Linking Aadhaar and Driving licence could soon become mandatory

In the next coming days, a law mandating Aadhaar card linkage with driving licence could soon be promulgated.

Law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad while speaking at a Science Congress in Phagwara [Punjab] said that a law to mandate the linkage was being worked upon.

The minister was speaking at the Science Congress at Lovely Professional University, and was quoted in a PTI story as saying, "We are soon going to bring a law which will make it mandatory to link Aadhaar with driving licence."

Prasad explained that in the present scheme of things, a "guilty person who causes an accident flees the scene and gets a duplicate licence. This helps him go scot-free."

"However, with the Aadhaar linkage you can change your name but you cannot change your biometrics, neither iris nor fingerprints. So the moment you go in for a duplicate licence, the system will say this person already has a driving licence and should not be given a new one," added Prasad.

Via a presentation, Prasad explained that Aadhaar had become of a digital profile of the country. "This is digital profile of India -- 123 crore Aadhaar cards,121 crore mobile phones, 44.6 crore smart phones, 56 crore internet users, there has been 51 per cent growth in e-commerce. There is 130 crore population in India," he emphasized.